Republicans on the warpath

Today’s editorial: The GOP wants to cut off funding for the health care law. Repealing it, in essence, would make the deficit all the more menacing.

There’s nothing subtle about the agenda that the Republicans intend to pursue, now that they’ve won a majority in the House and made substantial gains in the Senate. There’s nothing fiscally responsible about it, either.

The party that first tried to stop health care reform and then campaigned against it is ready to make good on its election promise. It can’t repeal the law, exactly. The votes aren’t there in the Senate, and President Obama of course would veto such a measure.

The Republican strategy is instead to refuse to pay for a law that will provide health insurance to an estimated 30 million Americans who didn’t have any when the law was passed. In one spending battle after another, the Republicans are ready to confront the Democrats with their determination to make the law meaningless.

They can restrict the funding of the Internal Revenue Service, for instance, so it can’t enforce such central provisions of the law as requiring almost everyone to have health insurance and mandating that employers help pay their employees’ insurance costs.

Listen to the battle cry sounded by Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 Republican in the House.

“If all of Obamacare cannot be immediately repealed, then it is my intention to begin repealing it piece by piece, blocking funding for its implementation and blocking the issuance of the regulations necessary to implement it,” he says.

Clear enough?

If not, here’s Mr. Cantor again.

“It is my intention to use every tool at our disposal to achieve full repeal of Obamacare.”

That’s hardly in line with the more cooperative tone that the Republican House leadership had struck in the immediate aftermath of last week’s midterm elections triumph. And it sends a defiant message to Mr. Obama, who has made it clear that he’s willing to renegotiate and modify parts of the law that are impractical. He’s open to what he calls “tweaks,” while the political opposition insists upon nullification.

Several of the law’s provisions offer cost savings provisions that a party so seemingly committed to deficit reduction ought to be battling to preserve, not overturn. Closer regulation of insurance rates, for instance, is expected to reduce the deficit by $140 billion over 10 years. Reductions in Medicare payments to health care providers is expected to save $445 billion.

Remember, too, that the Republicans are as determined to extend tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans as they are to blocking the health care law.

That adds another $700 billion to the deficit over 10 years, and brings the cost of making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for everyone to more than $3 trillion.

This is the party of fiscal restraint? Political confrontation — reminiscent of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Clinton — seems more like it. That led to the government shutdown in 1995, for which the Republicans paid dearly.

What happens, then, if Mr. Obama has no choice but to veto legislation aimed at undermining the health care law?

“I don’t think we’ll get to that,” comes word from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.